"One of the slaves, all right," Jack concluded.
"Was there doubt?"
"There's always doubt when you deal with people like Gazen." Jack shook his head. "She isn't going to have a very pleasant night."
"I do not understand."
"She's probably wondering if I'm some kind of plant," Jack explained. "I shouldn't have mentioned that I'd talked to Gazen. Most of the slaves in here have probably never even heard the name, let along talked to the guy." He shivered, a violent shake that ran through his whole body. "Geez, it's cold."
Draycos cocked his head. "Put the blanket behind you," he suggested. "Drape it between you and the wall."
Jack did as instructed, folding the blanket in half first to provide the thickest insulation possible. Now his chest was exposed to the air, but at least he wasn't leaning up against the cold metal wall anymore. "Good," Draycos said.
"Now hold still."
And with a surge against Jack's shirt, the dragon leaped off his skin.
Twisting around in midair, he managed to avoid whacking his head on the low ceiling and landed on Jack's chest and hips.
"Oof!" Jack grunted. Draycos had come down with his paws straddling Jack's chest and legs, but even with most of his weight supported that way there was enough left over for Jack to feel it. "What did you have for breakfast? Cement omelets?"
"I am sorry," Draycos murmured, his breath warm on Jack's cheek. "I was hoping I
could help you keep warm."
"I appreciate it," Jack said. Having the dragon three-dimensional certainly made the packing crate more cramped.
But on the plus side, the K'da was radiating a fair amount of heat. Already he could feel the chill starting to leave his skin. "Matter of fact, I appreciate it a lot," he added. "Thanks."
"You are welcome," Draycos said. "I agree with Maerlynn, that you should sleep if you can. It will help pass the time, and the temperature may become much colder later."
"Good point," Jack said, swiveling his shoulders and hips into the most comfortable positions he could. "See you in the morning."
CHAPTER 6
Between all the preparation, the long walk from the spaceport, and the burglary itself, it had been a long, hard day. Despite the uncomfortable position the hotbox forced on him, Jack soon fell into a deep sleep.
Sometime in the middle of the night he woke up again, shivering, to find that his gold-scaled K'da blanket had vanished. Draycos had reached the end of his six-hour limit and had returned to two-dimensional form against Jack's skin.
Wrapping himself in his blanket, thinking unkind thoughts about K'da endurance, he huddled in the cold and tried to get back to sleep.
He awoke again to find a bright edge of sunlight streaming in under the hotbox door. The chill of night was gone, and the temperature in his prison had become quite comfortable.
But that relief turned out to be as short-lived as Uncle Virgil's temper in a card game. Within minutes, or so it seemed, the hotbox went from cozy to warm to uncomfortably warm.
And it got worse. Soon the thin metal behind his back grew hot enough to burn skin that lingered against it for too long. Once again he pressed Maerlynn's blanket into service, folding it between his back and the wall.
Sometime around noon he drifted off into a restless sleep, full of strange and feverish dreams. Old memories mixed with images from past and present. He saw Uncle Virgil, tall and arrogant, wrestling with Draycos as he shouted out safecracking lessons to Gazen and a group of Brummgas.
The dream faded away and was replaced by another, this one featuring some of the mercenaries he'd met in the Whinyard's Edge. Under Sergeant Grisko's shouted direction, Jommy Randolph and Alison Kayna recited one of Draycos's poems, getting half the words wrong.
At one point he was back aboard the Star of Wonder, only it also seemed to be the Essenay's dayroom. Seated across the table from him, Cornelius Braxton and his wife were arguing about Orion Arm history, the future of Braxton Universis, and the price of mangoes in Sumatra. On the table between them was a huge pitcher of water, an inch out of Jack's reach.
Once, he thought he woke to hear voices calling to him from outside the box.
But by then his brain was so blurred that he couldn't tell what was real and what wasn't.
It was all so foggy, in fact, that when the hotbox door finally swung open and a
Brummga ordered him out he assumed it was just another dream. He had slogged across the sand, and was stumbling through a patch of clover-grass before it finally dawned on him that he really was out.
"How do you feel?" a familiar voice asked quietly from his side.
Jack blinked the sweat out of his eyes and looked at the pineapple-skinned Ysanhar walking beside him. That was why his arm felt odd, he realized suddenly.
Maerlynn was walking beside him, holding that arm in a steadying grip. "I'm okay," he croaked, trying to pull away from her.
"Just relax," she told him, not loosening her grip in the slightest. "You're not in any shape to walk on your own."
"I can do it," Jack insisted. Privately, though, he had to admit she was right.
Hazy patches were chasing each other across his vision, and every couple of steps he briefly lost track of which way was up and which was sideways. The sun had disappeared behind the trees of the nearby forest, and he shivered violently every time a breeze cut through his sweat-drenched clothes.
But he was human, and he had his pride. More than that, he was Jack Morgan.
He could do this on his own.
Maerlynn was having none of it. "Oh, come on," she chided. "Give your pride a rest, all right? Besides, if you fall on your face I'm the one who'll have to pick you up."
Jack's knees buckled briefly, and the flicker of pride faded away. "Yeah," he muttered. "Okay."
She led him into one of the long buildings. Just as the outside had looked like a broken-down version of a Whinyard's Edge barracks, so too did the inside.
Most of the space was taken up by a single room, with rows of narrow cots lining the walls on both sides. At one end, in the direction Maerlynn was leading him, there was a small open area with a couple of dilapidated tables and a few rickety chairs. At the other end was what appeared to be a small washroom.
And packed into the room were slaves.
Jack found himself staring as Maerlynn led him between the rows of beds.
There were at least a dozen different species represented, he saw, from thick-scaled Doloms to feather-covered Jantris to even a handful of humans.
Most of them were on their beds. Some were sitting on the edges of the cots, talking quietly with their neighbors or fiddling with cards or small trinkets.
A
couple were whittling with what seemed to be homemade knives.
But the majority of the slaves were lying down. Lying stretched out on backs or sides, or lying curled around themselves in postures of fatigue or hopelessness.
A few of them looked up as he and Maerlynn passed. Most didn't even bother.
"I've made you up a bed with my other children," Maerlynn said as she led him to the open area and sat him down at one of the tables. "You'll want to sleep soon—a session in the hotbox drains a person more than you might think. But first we need to get you something to eat and drink."
"This him?" an eager young voice asked from Maerlynn's other side.
Jack tilted his head to look past the Ysanhar as the newcomer came into view around her. It was a human boy, maybe six or seven, short and thin. His hair was carrot-colored, with a faceful of freckles behind the deep tan.
"This is him," Maerlynn confirmed as she pulled up one of the other chairs and sat down diagonally from Jack. "This is Noy, one of my children. And I believe I
heard the guard call you Jack when he let you out?"
"That's right," Jack said, frowning. A human boy was one of an Ysanhar's children? "Jack McCoy."
"Nice to meet you, Jack," Maerlynn said. "Officially, anyway. Noy, where's the pitcher?"